Besides theory and numerics, experimental flow analysis is one of the classical tools in research as well as industrial environments. The goal of experiments
is to visualize the flow field to gain insight about the flow's fluid mechanics, to verify flow models or—more from an application point of
view—to verify flow technical design decisions. The huge number of modern research facilities of the aerospace, car manufacturing, ship building and
nautic industry as well as the chemical engineering and biological fluid mechanics research emphasize the high scientific and economic importance of this
research field.
During the last years, a constant shift from experimental flow research towards numerical flow research could be observed in both academia and industry.
The main reason for this shift is the enormous increase in processing power of today's computers which greatly broadened the applications of computational
fluid dynamics (CFD). However, this development also illustrated two issues: First, the numerical results were not as good as expected regarding e.g. the
quantitative prediction of flow resistence and, therefore, could not be considered an adequate alternative to flow experiments for the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, it also became apperent that there are little measurement techniques which are comparable to numerical flow research with respect to the
insight gained from the experiment. This applies to the generation of spatially well-resolved data sets as well as the temporal-spatial analysis of flow
fields and the derivation of complex transport quantities. The DFG focal point program "Bildgebende Messverfahren für die
Strömungsanalyse" (image generating measurement techniques for the analysis of flows) is supposed to close this gap by developing more advanced,
image generating measurement techniques for the analysis of complex 3D flow fields.
The program is supposed to advance experimental flow research as an accepted key technology and to greatly improve the capabilities of the respective
technologies. Fluid mechanics engineers, experimental physicists, and computer scientists are cooperating in this project to reach this goal.
The focus of the program is the development of image generating techniques to obtain spatial quantitative information about both steady and unsteady flows.
Finally, these improved techniques—together with numerical simulation—will help to unlock the gate to the hitherto almost
unknown world of unsteady fluid mechanics.
The Institute of Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS) is working on the subproject
"Analyse und Visualisierung von Strukturen in digitalen
Strömungsgfeldern" (analysis and visualization of structures in digital flow fields). This work is done in cooperation with the
Institute of Aero- and Gasdynamics (IAG). The project's goals are the identification, extraction, tracking, and
quantification of flow structures in flow fields of both experimental flow research and numerical simulation. The research goes hand-in-hand: While the
researchers at IAG derive methods to identify, extract, and seperate vortices and implement prototypes with general tools like TecPlot and Matlab, the
researchers at VIS optimize the given algorithms by employing modern graphics hardware where applicable. The resulting implementations are made available
to the project partners.
Within the project we developed a 2D LIC tool for the interactive visualization of steady/unsteady flow. You can download the program following this
link.
Publications arisen from the project can be downloaded from the
publications page
of the Institute of Visualization and Interactive Systems.
DFG focal point program 1147 (only available in German)
Tobias.Schafhitzel@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
